Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 02/05/08

The Journal of Economic Perspectives

 

Vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 2007

Symposium: Organ Transplants

• Introducing Incentives in the Market for Live and Cadaveric Organ Donations
  Gary S. Becker and Julio Jorge Elías

  We evaluate the introduction of monetary incentives in the market for live and cadaveric organ donations. We show that monetary incentives would increase the supply of organs for transplant sufficiently to eliminate the very large queues in organ markets, and the suffering and deaths of many of those waiting, without increasing the total cost of transplant surgery by more than about 12 percent. We build on the value-of-life literature and other parts of economic analysis to estimate the equilibrium cost of live transplants for kidneys and livers. We also show that market price for kidneys will be determined by the cost of live donations, even though most organs will come from cadavers.

• Producing Organ Donors
  David H. Howard

  Organ transplantation is one of the greatest technological achievements of modern medicine, but the ability of patients to benefit from transplantation is limited by shortages of transplantable organs. The median waiting time for patients placed on the kidney transplant waiting list is over three years. Median waiting times for hearts and livers are seven months and two years, respectively. From 1995 to 2005, the number of patients placed on the waiting list for organ transplants grew at an annualized rate of 4 percent per year. As a result of the growth in the demand for organs, many observers have questioned whether the current system is capable of providing enough transplantable organs. Transplant physicians and policymakers are seriously debating proposals to pay donors and their families and to change the legal regime governing the process of obtaining consent to donation. This paper provides an overview of the rules and practices that govern the organ procurement system and reviews proposals to increase donation rates, with a focus on deceased donors.

• Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets
  Alvin E. Roth

  This essay examines how repugnance sometimes constrains what transactions and markets we see. When my colleagues and I have helped design markets and allocation procedures, we have often found that distaste for certain kinds of transactions is a real constraint, every bit as real as the constraints imposed by technology or by the requirements of incentives and efficiency. I'll first consider a range of examples, from slavery and indentured servitude (which are much more repugnant now than they once were) to lending money for interest (which used to be widely repugnant but no longer is), and from bans on eating horse meat in California to bans on dwarf tossing in France. An example of special interest will be the widespread laws against the buying and selling of organs for transplantation. The historical record suggests that while repugnance can change over time, it can persist for a very long time, although changes in institutions that reflect repugnance can occur relatively quickly when the underlying repugnance changes.

Symposium: The Adequacy of Retirement Saving

• Are You Sure You’re Saving Enough for Retirement?
  Jonathan Skinner

  Many view the soon-to-retire Baby Boomers as woefully unprepared for their golden years, while other economists have taken a more sanguine view of American levels of saving. And if Americans are failures at saving enough for retirement, why are some retirees so happy? The seemingly simple question of "Am I saving enough for retirement?" is apparently not so simple at all. Instead, it touches on a variety of deeper issues in economics, psychology, and health policy. I use the program ESPlanner to present life-cycle retirement wealth targets for a range of incomes and situations typical of American Economic Association members. (Readers are warned that life-cycle retirement wealth targets presented in this paper may lead to feelings of financial inadequacy.)

• Heuristics and Biases in Retirement Savings Behavior
  Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler

  Standard economic theories of saving implicitly assume that households have the cognitive ability to solve the relevant optimization problem and the willpower to execute the optimal plan. Both of the implicit assumptions are suspect. Even among economists, few spend much time calculating a personal optimal savings rate. Instead, most people cope by adopting simple heuristics, or rules of thumb. In this paper, we investigate both the heuristics and the biases that emerge in the area of retirement savings. We examine the decisions employees make about whether to join a savings plan, how much to contribute, and how to invest. Saving for retirement is a difficult problem, and most employees have little training upon which to draw in making the relevant decisions. Perhaps as a result, investors are relatively passive. They are slow to join advantageous plans; they make infrequent changes; and they adopt naive diversification strategies. In short, they need all the help they can get. We discuss the possible role of interventions aiming to improve retirement decision making. Fortunately, many effective ways to help participants are also the least costly interventions: namely, small changes in plan design, sensible default options, and opportunities to increase savings rates and rebalance portfolios automatically.

Articles

• Firms in International Trade
  Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding and Peter K. Schott

  Since the mid-1990s, researchers have used micro datasets to study countries' production and trade at the firm level and have found that exporting firms differ substantially from firms that solely serve the domestic market. Across a wide range of countries and industries, exporting firms have been shown to be larger, more productive, more skill- and capital-intensive, and to pay higher wages than nonexporting firms. These differences exist even before exporting begins and have important consequences for evaluating the gains from trade and their distribution across factors of production. The new empirical research challenges traditional models of international trade and, as a result, the focus of the international trade field has shifted from countries and industries towards firms and products. Recently available transaction-level U.S. trade data reveal new stylized facts about firms' participation in international markets, and recent theories of international trade incorporating the behavior of heterogenous firms have made substantial progress in explaining patterns of trade and productivity growth.

• Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalization
  David Hummels

  While the precise causes of postwar trade growth are not well understood, declines in transport costs top the lists of usual suspects. However, there is remarkably little systematic evidence documenting the decline. This paper brings to bear an eclectic mix of data in order to provide a detailed accounting of the time-series pattern of shipping costs. The ad-valorem impact of ocean shipping costs is not much lower today than in the 1950s, with technological advances largely trumped by adverse cost shocks. In contrast, air shipping costs have dropped an order of magnitude, and airborne trade has grown rapidly as a result. As a result, international trade has also experienced a significant rise in speed.

• Does Antitrust Need to be Modernized?
  Dennis W. Carlton

  Economics has had an enormous positive effect on the evolution of antitrust policy over the last 30 years or so. However, the evolving forces of technology and globalization, together with experience gained over time, suggest that further modernization is in order. This paper addresses a number of controversial antitrust doctrines that need fixing, or at least some modernizing. Specifically, I analyze market definition; the interaction of intellectual property and antitrust law; certain types of exclusionary conduct (tying and bundling discounts); and procedural issues involving economic matters such as damage multiples, the right to sue, and laws of contribution. I am currently Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and have served as a Commissioner on the Congress-appointed Antitrust Modernization Commission (AMC). While I've drawn on these experiences in forming my opinions, the views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the AMC or those of the Department of Justice.

• The Causes and Consequences of Wal-Mart's Growth
  Emek Basker

  Wal-Mart is the largest retailer and the largest private employer in the United States. The competitive pressures created by large retailers have long been controversial, and Wal-Mart's growth has raised concerns about its economic impact on workers, communities, and competitors. This paper aims to dispel some of the myths regarding Wal-Mart and to replace them with a systematic accounting of what is known about Wal-Mart's impact on the U.S. and global economy. The paper begins by exploring the source of Wal-Mart's competitive advantage. It then examines some of the economic effects of Wal-Mart: how Wal-Mart stores affect local labor markets, consumer prices, product selection, local and global competitors, and suppliers. I then turn to Wal-Mart's interaction with public policy issues in matters of global trade as well as state and local legislation on wages, benefits, zoning, and subsidies.

• Natural Disasters, Economic Development, and Humanitarian Aid
  David Strömberg

  Natural disasters are one of the major problems facing humankind. Between 1980 and 2004, two million people were reported killed and five billion people cumulatively affected by around 7,000 natural disasters, according to the dataset maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at University of Louvain (Belgium). The economic costs are considerable and rising. The direct economic damage from natural disasters between 1980–2004 is estimated at around $1 trillion. This paper starts by describing the incidence of natural disasters, where they strike, and their development over time. It then discusses how societal factors act to protect people from or expose them to natural hazards. The final section discusses the determinants and targets of international aid to disaster victims.

• Human Capital and the Productivity of Suicide Bombers
  Efraim Benmelech and Claude Berrebi

  This paper studies the relation between the human capital of suicide bombers and the outcomes of their suicide attacks. We argue that human capital is an important factor in the production of terrorism and that if terrorists behave rationally, we should observe that more able suicide bombers are assigned to more important targets. To validate the theoretical predictions and estimate the returns to human capital in suicide bombing, we use a unique dataset detailing the biographies of Palestinian suicide bombers, the targets they attack, and the number of people that they kill and injure. Our empirical analysis suggests that older and more educated suicide bombers are being assigned by their terror organization to more important targets. We find that more educated and older suicide bombers are less likely to fail in their mission and are more likely to cause increased casualties when they attack.

Features

• Recommendations for Further Reading
  Timothy Taylor

• Notes